Billed as the world’s first 3-D erotic film, “3D Sex & Zen” certainly features in-your-face 3-D — watch out for the flying horse penis — but it’s too silly to be considered even remotely erotic, despite plenty of disrobed Asian beauties. The latest film ...

In cinema, as in music, micro-trends come and go: Will anyone remember “mumblecore” a decade from now? Yet the ’80s French movement known as le cinema du look, based on three brash young French directors, has aged remarkably well. Jean-Jacques Beineix (“Diva”), Luc Besson ...

America’s infamous outlaw journalist Hunter S. Thompson was, like many of his generation, a bone-deep admirer of author Ernest Hemingway, so much so that he even typed out word-for-word two of Hemingway’s novels — “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell To Arms.” Thompson ...

I knew a dancer back in the States who worked with the Washington Ballet … by day. Some nights, under a different name, she performed as a stripper in a seedier part of town. While recognizing the need for secrecy, she herself had no ...

When unarmed teen Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in Florida by paranoid neighborhood-watch vigilante George Zimmerman in February, the usual flurry of American media debate ensued. One of the more heated tangents came when celebrity newscaster Geraldo Rivera stated — on Fox News, naturally ...

Sampling, mashups, ripping and remixing — in an age of infinitely accessible and increasingly malleable digital audio, the question of who’s allowed to do what with someone else’s original music is becoming ever more heated. If you use a piece of software such as ...

Once upon a time, short films actually played in cinemas, as an opening act for the feature presentation. But as feature films got longer and cinemas tried to squeeze in ever more screenings, the shorts eventually fell by the wayside. As a result they ...

Ten minutes into “Act of Valor”, I could practically hear the voice of Homer Simpson in my head, delivering his own critique of the movie: “Ooh, propatainment!” Boasting the full cooperation of the Pentagon and featuring actual United States special-forces operatives playing all the ...

Shibuya’s Theater N may not exactly fit the definition of a grindhouse — its polite staff and lack of dodgy-looking stains on the seats rule that out — but any cinema doing a late-show revival of 1978′s notorious “I Spit on Your Grave” earns ...

A guy’s on a trip to Paris with his fiancee. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a hack Hollywood screenwriter bemoaning the fact that he never became a “real” author and, besotted by the city’s charms, toys with the idea of staying and doing just that. ...

There are plenty of anecdotes about the late John Cassavetes — the director often cited as the “godfather of American independent cinema” — but my favorite is the one regarding an advance screening he did for his 1977 film “Opening Night,” about an alcoholic ...